In his short life of thirty-eight years, the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck emerged as an isolated figure avoiding the excesses of the experimental movements of his time (the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter) and grafting on to his romantic northern temperament a deep love of Italian and French art and a special admiration of the work of Rodin and Maillol.
His sensitively modelled works in artificial stone or bronze are imbued with a languor and a spirituality, and in his Kneeling Woman and its companion figure, the Youth Ascending, there is lyrical tenderness and elongation of form but never sentimentality or melodrama.
Philip James
